Rodrigo Nunes on “One or Two Melancholias? 1917, 1968 and the Question of Organisation”

This presentation weaves together two themes that have been recurrent in philosophical and political debates of recent years. The first is a revival of interest in Walter Benjamin’s concept of “leftwing melancholy” and the identification of melancholia as an intrinsic element of the left’s “structure of feeling” or desire; the second is the call for a return to the question of political organisation. By contrasting different accounts of left melancholia, I suggest that we might be dealing not with one, but two different melancholias whose mutual opposition both prevents them from being fully avowed and blocks the possibility of fruitful engagements with the question of organisation. I finish by suggesting a way of posing that question that might help us escape this deadlock and claim the legacies of both 1917 and 1968 without the baggage of an unhealthy attachment to past defeats.

Rodrigo Nunes is professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless. Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute, 2014) and of numerous articles in publications such as Les Temps Modernes, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Nueva Sociedad, Viewpoint and others. His new book, Beyond the Horizontal. Rethinking the Question of Organisation, is forthcoming with Verso.